Rep. Peter King: Obama Had The ‘Moral’ Responsibility To Oppose NYC Mosque

The last time we saw Republican New York Congressman Peter King, he was playing the Felix to Rep. Anthony Weiner‘s Oscar over aid to 9/11 relief workers. Today he visited Fox News sans sidekick to comment on President Barack Obama‘s support of the lower Manhattan Islamic community center, and while he noted that “nobody is questioning the right” to have it, he would have liked to see more sensitivity over the emotions of the 9/11 victims.

Rep. King argued that the community center was creating a “gaping wound which is being torn open again by Muslim leadership,” and while reiterating several times that the people in charge of the center do have First Amendment rights and should not be legally barred from putting it there, there was a serious gap in sensitivity between the people in charge of the center and the people who live around it or lost loved ones during the September 11th attacks:

“The responsibility here was to meet with the community, meet with the 911 families and realize the sensitivity involved and move the mosque to another location similar to what the Carmelite nuns did at Auschwitz when the Pope intervened and didn’t question the right to have the convent there, but said it was very, very insensitive to the Jews who lost so many millions of people in the Holocaust [more on that here –ed.]”

As for the President’s take, King wasn’t as lenient as the weekend Fox & Friends crew, citing that the only authority the President really has on this issue is “moral” and that he also had the “moral responsibility” to “address what this is going to do to the psyche of so many people.”

The segment from Fox News today below: